Winners Announced!

Challenge entries focused on creating data visualization tools and maps that connect current science on climate change to the exposure pathways for environmental hazards, in order to help decision makers and communities identify areas and people at greatest risk and help to prioritize protective actions. Tools created included visualizations of such climate and social factors as sea level rise, flooding, high heat, vulnerable communities, and hazardous waste sites, which were overlayed with maps of health outcomes such as mortality, cardiovascular disease, emergency room admissions, and asthma. Winning submissions will be incorporated into the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit and disseminated to communities and decision makers.

Additional information and interviews with winners can be found on: The NIEHS E-Factor

1st Place, National Tool category: PIE VIZ: Populations, Infrastructures, and Exposures Visualization Tool

Developed by a team at Virginia Tech, Pie VIZ combines datasets on power outages, air pollution levels, and extreme heat across the contiguous United States and includes tool incorporates social isolation metrics to allow a to visualize county-level extreme heat and dangerous air pollution days and can select a county to view attributes including numbers of isolated persons.

1st Place, Local Tool category: Effects of Climate Change on the Future of Local Communities in Indianapolis: A prototype

Created by a team at IUPUI, this tool leverages climate and health data in an interactive web portal that displays and communicates potential health and environmental effects of climate change including flooding, extreme heat, and air pollution, on a low income, disadvantaged Indianapolis neighborhood: the Near West Neighborhood.

2nd Place, Local Tool category (tie): The San Francisco Climate and Health Profile

Developed by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Climate and Health Profile is an innovative web-based tool that links climate change projections with their associated health outcomes and identifies populations and locations most vulnerable to these health outcomes. By centralizing and formalizing the collection of neighborhood-level data, the Climate and Health Profile provides neighborhood organizations, city departments, and direct service providers a simple, streamlined way to access information on climate and health.

2nd Place, Local Tool category (tie): Up with the Waters: Climate change, flooding and contamination in the River City

Developed by a team based at Washington University in St. Louis, Up With the Waters Up With the Waters is a series of maps that help residents identify areas of greatest potential risks of exposure in future flooding events. The tool includes a various maps highlighting the number of St. Louisans that live and work near contamination sites within the floodplain. Visualizations also identify public parks that have high likelihood of becoming contaminated. This tool is intended to help government and land managers prioritize clean-up of the most heavily contaminated and populated areas within the flood plain in order to minimize exposure risks to the people of St. Louis.

See also the NIEHS Announcement of the winners

Submissions for this challenge will close at 9AM EST, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016.

Climate change is likely to alter the risks posed by environmental exposures in ways that are just beginning to be explored. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences invites you to help decision makers around the country understand and address climate change’s effects on environmental health risks by joining the Climate Change and Environmental Exposures Challenge (#climatechallengeNIEHS).  By creating data visualization tools and maps that connect current science on climate change to the exposure pathways for environmental hazards, innovators can help identify areas and people at greatest risk and help to prioritize protective actions.

You can visit the NIEHS webpage for this challenge for additional information about the challenge and examples of data sets.

Background

Communities can face health risks from a variety of environmental exposures, including hazardous wastes and deposits of industrial chemicals, air pollution, harmful algal blooms, toxic contaminants in food, and exposures to pesticides. The effects of climate change may exacerbate these health risks. Fortunately, newly released data and tools, in combination with other publicly available datasets, allow for innovative approaches to demonstrating and assessing such risks.

Better information about climate change’s potential impacts on environmental exposures would improve a wide range of important protective decisions. At the local level, such decisions might include where to build day care centers or new housing. This information could also assist local decision makers on critical infrastructure questions, such as where to place new water intakes for drinking water systems, design or siting of urban waste water drainage or green infrastructure, or placement of monitoring equipment or other sensors.

At the national level, greater understanding of climate change’s influence on the magnitude and spatial distribution of environmental exposures would inform decisions about prioritizing efforts to remove pollution and contaminants. This information would also be useful in setting national standards or policies.

Examples of environmental exposures:

1) Toxic chemicals released from hazardous waste, mining or other industrial sites. Several of the effects of climate change may exacerbate these exposures (for example, rising sea level, increased temperatures and permafrost melting, changes in wind patterns, or other climate-related ecological processes).

2) Air pollutants. These can include ozone and particulate matter—as climate change causes temperatures to increase or weather patterns to change, certain regions may see an increase or decrease in these pollutants.

3) Toxins created by molds or waterborne bacteria or algae. Climate change will increase the frequency of extreme rainfall in certain areas, which, in combination with rising temperatures, can foster the growth of indoor fungi and molds. Similarly, elevated waterborne disease outbreaks have been reported in weeks following heavy rainfall.

4) Pesticides. As the climate changes, farmers are expected to need to use more herbicides and pesticides because of increased growth of pests and weeds.

5) Other exposures. You may want to propose environmental exposures other than the ones listed above.  If you do want to explore a different environmental exposure, your submission should include a statement explaining the importance of the exposure to human health and the relationship between climate change and changes in that exposure in the future.